Education Bill

Baroness Hoey Excerpts

Tuesday 8th February 2011 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove]

My hon. Friend, as a former teacher, always adds to our debates with his experience and authority. He is right that some of the work force changes made by the previous Government mean that a number of children are taught by cover supervisors or teaching assistants. We all want to ensure that everyone who is teaching and who is in the classroom is trained to the highest possible level.

[Kate Hoey (Vauxhall) (Lab)]

Does the Secretary of State agree that one problem, if we are honest, is that for too long many of us have accepted bad teachers? To get rid of a teacher has been almost unthinkable. The question is not really about unqualified teachers, but about teachers who are not doing the job of raising standards properly.

[Michael Gove]

As so often, the hon. Lady is absolutely right. One problem in the education system is that we need to make it easier for good heads to tackle underperformance by encouraging staff to do the professional development that they need to improve. If they do not improve, they should move on. No one benefits when poor teachers are in the classroom. It not only places an additional burden on hard-working and talented staff, but denies children the chance that they need.

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[Kate Hoey (Vauxhall) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow the measured speech of the hon. Member for Stevenage (Stephen McPartland). Let me say first that I support many aspects of the Bill and will not join my colleagues in opposing it tonight. A number of issues can be clarified and corrected in Committee. One important issue that I feel should be looked at again is the whole question of support staff, who are so important in any school. I am not sure that the issue has been looked at carefully enough. It is the sort of matter that should be probed in Committee.

I welcome the abolition of the Training and Development Agency and the General Teaching Council for England. I welcome the fact that we can finally get back to having a Secretary of State who has to take responsibility and has to be accountable to this Parliament for what happens in education. I also welcome the fact that the Bill makes it clear that trainee teachers who do not meet the required standards should face termination of employment. As I said earlier, for too long we have tolerated poor performance in the teaching profession and we have been afraid to be honest to those who simply are not good enough. For me, there is no more important profession than that of educating the next generation. We need to foster a culture of excellence, not of complacency. As many have pointed out, we would not tolerate a pilot who had a questionable record in flying and we would not go to a doctor who always gets a diagnosis wrong. Why, then, should we accept a teacher who we know does not deliver for her children?

There are many good schools in my constituency, but one in particular has always taken that sort of approach to teacher training—the Durand school, now the Durand academy. Durand spent years fighting the local authority, Lambeth council, because it refused to accept anything less than great teaching for its school. For more than 16 years, the school has had innovative social entrepreneurship under its belt, under the inspirational leadership of the executive head, Greg Martin and the head, Mark McLaughlin. It has gone from being a failing school to an outstanding one. It has built on-site accommodation for teachers who are new to London; it has a health club with special rates for parents; and it has truly self-helped.

Durand has been creative in showing how a school can use its property assets for social good, and I would encourage other schools to do the same. Through its own endeavours it bought 19 acres in Sussex, in the constituency of the hon. Member for Chichester (Mr Tyrie). It was formerly the site of a grade II listed private school and then a local education authority special school. It is the most amazing of locations, where Durand wants to open the first truly free-of-charge state boarding school, offering the best possible educational experience to inner-city teenagers.

The intake of the Durand primary school in Stockwell is extremely diverse: 95% of children come from black or ethnic minority backgrounds; more than 50% are on free school meals; and more than 40% live in overcrowded households. Despite those statistics, the quality of attainment, behaviour and attitude at the school is impeccable. It is an outstanding school, which has proved time and again that a low-income background need not mean low expectations for children. It is built on hugely important leadership.

Children leave Durand at the age of 11, and many subsequently fail to achieve five good GCSEs. Last year children leaving Durand were transferred to 20 different secondary schools, many outside the borough and many of poor quality. It is to be hoped that at the end of the current school year, if the right decisions are made and if the system proves successful, children will stay on in the middle school and, at the age of 13, will board between Monday morning and Friday afternoon. That will enable them to retain links with their community, and will allow their families—many of whom live in overcrowded accommodation—to see them receive the best possible education while also benefiting from the extra time that boarding schools provide for sport and the other extracurricular activities that are so rarely found in inner-city areas such as mine.

Parents want choice. They want the best, and they do not see why the best should be available, or offered, only to those who can pay or who come from the most affluent areas. That cannot be right. Labour Members need to be honest. For a long time we have espoused the benefits of academies as one part of a broad system of education. Academy status has given proven successful schools such as Durand the freedom that they need in order to develop education and tailor it in accordance with their intake, helping each and every child to reach its full potential. Parents want those options: they recognise that one size does not fit all, and that local authorities do not have all the answers. There have been many struggles involving my local authority, which wanted to impose a straitjacket on its schools to ensure that they were all the same.

As a former grammar school girl, I feel strongly that my party must not lose ownership of aspiration. In the past month, my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Stephen Twigg) hosted an event in the House on behalf of Progress, which reached the same conclusion. For a number of years many of my hon. Friends supported the views of Lord Adonis of Camden Town, and we are familiar with his views on much of the Bill. My constituent Katharine Birbalsingh—who may be better known for speaking at a Conservative party conference but who is a brilliant teacher, as will be clear to anyone who meets and talks to her—has shown the same willingness to believe that every child can aspire to and, indeed, reach the top. I am proud that she is my constituent, because what she says and writes is based entirely on the reality of what is happening in many inner-city schools.

We must be honest, and reflect the views of all involved in education and teaching rather than just those of the unions. Theirs is an important voice, but it is not the only one. I want us to speak for the family of the child from Myatt’s Fields estate in Stockwell who wants to reach for the stars—for the family who want for their child the options that are available to a child from the richest family in the land. I want us to speak up for the silent majority, who are often without a voice.

If the Education Bill helps schools like Durand which pride themselves on great teaching to become a model for others to follow, I welcome it; if the Education Bill helps schools like Durand which insist on good discipline to enforce that discipline, I welcome it; and if the Education Bill helps schools like Durand which want to open a new secondary state boarding school for disadvantaged children to deliver that, I welcome it, and urge its adoption.

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[Glenda Jackson (Hampstead and Kilburn) (Lab)]

What a pleasure it is to follow the hon. Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman), who has broken the overwhelming trend in the contributions we have heard from Government Members, which has been to paint a virtually dystopian picture of education in our country in which virtually every classroom is a battlefield, every teacher is incompetent and lacking in inspiration, every child is badly taught and where examination results are lamentable in comparison with other countries.

The ability of children who receive free school meals to make it to Oxbridge seems to have been the recurring theme. The hon. Member for Central Devon (Mel Stride), who was the most recent Member to make that contribution, gave the example of Westminster school. If he is so concerned, why is he not arguing ferociously with the Government to fund pupils in our schools to the level charged in fees by Westminster and for class sizes to be as small as the standard not only in Westminster, but in every private school in this country?

As far as I can see, the Bill is a typical Government piece of legislation; it purports to be under the overarching aegis of giving back to people in this country the right to make local decisions that affect them in their local areas, but it does exactly the opposite. It will put powers into the hands of the Secretary of State that are currently undreamt of by many local authorities and by the schools in my constituency.

What I find most paradoxical is the way Government Members have bought what the Government are attempting to sell in the Bill. It starts with early-years education, because the Govt have trumpeted loud and long that every disadvantaged two-year-old—we are yet to know what will constitute that disadvantage because the Government have given us no detail—will be able to have nursery education. They then attempt to convince us that a child going from age two to five will of course be given a place in a local primary school—there is a desperate need for primary school places in my constituency—and that there will then be a gradual progression on to secondary school. Hang on a moment, because it looks, certainly from what the Government have said and from what has happened in my constituency, as though when children get to the age of 11 there will be no comprehensive schools left, only academies and free schools. The central and monstrous aspect of the Bill is that it will reintroduce a form of selection in schools. If there is no concerted local area agreement on what constitutes an admissions policy for all schools, we will see a return to what people of my generation lived through, which is the “them and us” approach to education for all our children.

The Secretary of State’s speech this afternoon culminated with the example of two schools that he admires and wants us to admire, but he ignored the fact that they rose to their present heights under a Labour Government.

[Kate Hoey]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Glenda Jackson]

No.

The Secretary of State also asserted that the Government are committed to ensuring that every child in this country has the best possible education. How can that conceivably be so when we are looking at a situation in which academies and free schools will be the only schools available to local people? We have no idea what the capital costs or revenue costs of those schools will be. The idea that we are making a real inroad into affording opportunity and aspiration for every child, however disadvantaged their background, by introducing free education for two-year-olds, when we know that Sure Start facilities are being closed even as we speak—